Markdoc

It's already been mentioned above, but giant beetles, giant lizards, giant worms and rhinos (or elephants!) all fit a desert/arid setting. You could up the ante by having giant riding scorpions or go Princess Mononoke with large antelope-types big enough to carry a rider. Any of the creatures of Barsoom, would fit the bill too. How about a nice Thoat? If you want to try something a bit more different, in my own fantasy world, Ogres are a race of very large humans, sorcerously modified to create strong, but none-too-bright shock troopers. Their old masters/creators are long gone, but the ogres survive and in a few places, ogres work with normal humans, serving as ... yes, well, shock troopers, or muscle. But a few places actually raise and train them as mounts. A mounted warrior on an armoured ogre - who has a couple of spiked gauntlets of his own! - is not very fast, but makes a fearsome opponent on the charge! cheers, Mark

Thanks. There was an earlier thread on trade (here: http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/73009-some-basics-of-trade-and-the-towncity-of-saltmarsh/) which covers the same sort of ground, but for trading goods rather than just buying them. Put those two things together and you are pretty much covered. Cheers, Mark

This is the problem with using wiki as your only source of information Pyrrhus won almost every battle against the Romans and inflicted heavier casualties than he took. He was considered by the Romans as one of the greatest military leaders of his time - Hannibal of Carthage reportedly called him the greatest military leader ever (which does sound like a stretch, to be honest) and he had a long string of military victories both before and after the war with Rome. So yeah, definately a successful general, no question about it. His problem was that he was not a successful politician. His military victories were never really matched with good political deals. As a result he spent his time racketing around the Med., continually fighting (and usually winning) battles only to lose the territory once he moved on. What happened in the Roman war - and the context of the famous quote - was that he expected the Romans' allies to desert them after the first few Greek victories, for Carthage to join him against the Romans and the Romans to sue for peace. None of those things happened - instead Carthage allied with Rome. At that point he realised he was facing a war of attrition against a much more numerous enemy. I'm not seeing your point here, to be honest. Yes, Pyrrhus used combined arms - the phalanx was always used as part of an army - but there's still no question that the phalanx went toe to toe with the legions in hilly terrain ... and beat them, as I noted. Amusingly, wiki - on a different page (did I note you should be wary of wiki as a primary source? ) states exactly the same (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Asculum_(279_BC)). According to Dionysius, on the first day of the battle, the phalanx met the Roman 1st legion on the left flank and routed them. In the meantime, the Roman 3rd and 4th legions drove his italian allies back and some Roman allies arriving (apparently by chance from behind Pyrrhus' army) attacked his camp. The Greek cavalry drove them off and with the phalanx on their flank, the Romans retreated to a steep wooded crag. On the second day of the battle, Pyrrhus seized the steep crags with light infantry. But that wasn't what defeated the legions - he did it just to prevent them retreating there as they had done the day before. Instead, he sent infantry supported by elephants against the legions. This time when they broke, there was no handy refuge and the Romans retreated. The wiki article makes reference to the elephants breaking the Roman line, and this comes from Plutarch, who made a big deal of them but (beware using wiki as a sole reference!) it ignores the rest of what he wrote, namely that the Romans fought valiantly sword against spear, but were driven back by Pyrrhus' spearmen. So yeah, the phalanx took on the legions and beat them when they were on the defence in rough terrain. Here's what Plutarch has to say 'Consequently, Pyrrhus found himself obliged to fight another battle, and after recuperating his army he marched to the city of Asculum, where he engaged the Romans. Here, however, he was forced into regions where his cavalry could not operate, and upon a river with swift current and wooded banks'. Asculum today is called Ascoli Piceno and if you google map it, you can still see the wooded crags, around the town, many of which have near-vertical sides. But it's all hilly terrain - there is, literally, no flat land anywhere in the vicinity ... which is hardly surprising, given that Asculum was a fortfied town in a river bend in the middle of the frikkin' mountains. You can see the terrain where the battle was fought here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/72776685@N05/8179839853/ Cheers, Mark

There's a story arc in Hellblazer like that, where a group of flash barrow-boy demons who are trading souls get their just comeuppance when Maggie Thatcher is re-elected and the bottom drops out of the soul market. cheers, Mark

I do this too - in games where we are tracking funds, I typically say "Deduct X coins to cover your general expenses for the last 3 weeks" and it's assumed that it covers food, a place to stay, drinks, getting minor equipment repairs, etc. Personally, I'm very much over the days where we tracked every GP, but we still do that in the Pathfinder game we play currently, because the GM likes it. In one campaign I ran, that lasted about 5 years of regular play, we pretty much dispensed with money entirely: it was assumed since the players were all in the employ of a lord that petty expenses were covered by saying "Send the bill to the castle", and when they needed larger expenses or travelling money, they simply asked the lord to cover it. cheers, Mark

Wealth gives you money, but not everyone has wealth, and for those who don't (and to some extent, even for those who do), costs are still relevant. Magic items may or may not be paid for in character points. In many (perhaps most) fantasy games they are are often treated as equipment and can be found or bought for money. cheers, Mark

In answer to the original poster, it's literally impossible to make a price list covering everything. For a start, in premodern societies, prices were extremely fluid: it's a case of what you could get for something. Secondly, prices varied enormously by location - you could literally see the usual price differ by 300-400% in two different towns in the same region, because transport was difficult and wealth unequally distributed. And secondly, you can never predict what players are going to want. I've had players ask how much to buy an anvil, for example, or a basket of live eels. Sooooo .... what does that mean? It means that GM's don't need a detailed price list in their head (or on their computer). It means they need a simple appreciation of what goods cost in the very general sense, and what people earn (again, in a general sense). That way, when players ask for something, you can make a good guess. For example, in a typical medieval European economy most ordinary workers earned enough in coin (even if they actually got paid in kind) to cover ordinary daily costs. So if (for example) an ordinary, unskilled worker gets (say) thruppence a day, then it should be possible to get 3 meals and a cheap hostel for the night for thruppence or a bit less (the actual unit is irrelevant - whatever you could call your coins, shells or units of commerce, the point is that basic daily expenses used to define very roughly what the working class earned: there was very little excess, which is why people fell into poverty as soon as they were unable to work). That means that a (very simple) meal and drink would cost less than a penny - you could buy half a loaf of bread and some cheese for a ha'penny aaaaaand - to get back to the original question, items like a firestarter kit (flint, steel and tinder) fall into the category of "barely-significant expense" in other words, not something that people buy every day or on impulse, but also not something that is out of reach of ordinary people. As the very roughest of rules of thumb, this means the cost is likely to be equivalent to a few days' wages for the worker class. As long as you have some idea of the cost, you can work from there. As a GM, I tend to group manufactured goods into "Cheap" (a day's wage or less), "barely significant" (a week's wage or less) moderate (a month's wage or less) or expensive (several months wages to the-sky-is-the-limit). Generally, I just make up a number based on my best guess (I'm never wrong, because there is no single right answer ) but if you want a rule, you could make up die rolls - for example, if you guess the price is "barely significant", d6+1 will give an an average of 4 (for a week's basic wage or less) and you can assume flint, steel and tinder will cost 2-7 days' wage - subject to further negotiation, of course. If we stick with a basic daily wage of thruppence, then it'd typically cost about a shilling (a silver piece, if you like). You can do this for anything - a basket of live eels? Between cheap and barely significant - say 2 days basic cost or about a sixpence. An anvil? Between moderate and expensive - let's say 3 months basic wage or about 260 pennies - call it 23 shillings .... etc Now these are just rank guesses, showing how I typically handle prices, but out of interest, I just looked up some actual prices and according to Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, by Christopher Dyer, an anvil in 1390 cost about 20 shilllings, so not too far off my guess. The advantage of this approach is that you can adapt it for whatever the basic wage is, and you can apply it to any request to generate a number that is likely to be in the right ballpark. I do have a list of the sorts of things that adventurers like - horses, weapons and armour, hostel costs, etc, to save myself time, but those costs are also intended to be approximate. cheers, Mark

One point that can easily be of general use - you made the point above about banks/pawnbrokers. This particular system, where banks made loans against specific items flourished for thousands of years, until the commodification of money by modern nation-states. Wealthy landowners could take loans against their land (this gave them special privileges in countries such as England, since land had special legal status and could not easily be seized for debt) but other people had to take loans against physical treasures or income. So, for example, banks gave loans against jewellery, against dresses, against political appointments that conferred income, against slaves ... against pretty much anything that could be sold. Why is this relevant? Because like most pawnbrokers, even today, the loan was usually for a fraction of the purchase price. A silk dress encrusted with a thousand seed pearls might have cost 12000 royals when ordered, but it can probably only be sold on for a quarter or a third of that price. The bank wants to make a profit so they are going to offer a tenth or a fifth of the original price. We have plenty of examples of medieval/renaissance banks acquiring things for a tenth or even a twentieth of the buying price - because if you really needed money, what was your other alternative? And just like many pawnbrokers today, many of those early "loans" were made in the foreknowledge by both parts that the loan was never going to be redeemed and that it was actually a sale. This explains a) who actually buys all that crap hauled into town by adventurers and b ) why they buy it for a fraction of what it costs new. In the premodern era, it makes sense to think of banks not as place where you keep your money (though they did that too) but as merchants who specialized in loans. cheers, Mark

Actually it was produced by Microprose - a US company co-founded by Sid Meier, who later went on to do the Civilisation series. cheers, Mark

Thanks - they estimate about 30,000 people took part in the vigil in Copenhagen with thousands more in other smaller towns and cities. Everybody hopes we can follow Norway's lead on this (in the way they responded to Breivik) and not let it poison public debate: so far, the political response has been reasonably measured, which is a good sign. cheers, Mark

And to follow up my earlier post about the shootings in Copenhagen, here's the response: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2955320/Danish-police-charge-two-aiding-Copenhagen-shooter.html cheers, Mark

Again, that doesn't really match my experience very well. There are certainly players who don't do combat well (edit: and our group has a couple ...), but in my experience, they do D20 or Hero system equally badly. Running a decent-sized team with multiple powers well is a challenge of the GM, but I honestly don't find Hero system harder than running a high level group of D20 PCs (rather the reverse, actually). It's not a question of experience, since I have lots of experience with both systems. It's more that a superheroic Champions PC can have a lot of options ... but generally fewer than a 15th level Wizard or Cleric in D20, and in my experience at least, is easier to run, since his options all use the same basic attack/effect or movement mechanisms. There's none of this "You can't use Vital Strike with Spring attack, because they are both attack options..." stuff. I do agree that Hero system combat can be a bit war gamey - in fact, we used to do one-off skirmish war-games with Hero system: glorious over-the-top character design fun! - but actually (again, in my experience) it's less so than with say, Pathfinder. cheers, Mark

I don't really agree. I very rarely get to play Hero these days, so when we use the system, I GM. As a GM, one of the things I like about Hero is that it's such a simple system to run. Character generation can be complex, yes, but the system itself uses a fairly simple, linear consistent game structure, which makes it easy to manage on the fly. That's one major reason it's remained my go-to system for games. The last time I ran a game, I didn't have my books with me, and to honest, didn't need them, even though we ran multiple combats in a variety of environments, plus a deal of non-combat activity (sneaking around, gathering information, building stuff, etc) cheers, Mark cheers, Mark

Probably a little from column A, a little from column B. Other friends who have published stuff with Hero have made similar comments. I'm a fan of HD personally, but with regard to sales, you are looking at a target market of "people who use Hero system, who also use HD, who also buy support material (primarily GMs) who are also running a fantasy game, who also want new monsters". There'll be a few exceptions (Star Hero GMs or MHI GMs, for example, who want new monsters/alien beasts) but that's your core market and to be perfectly honest, it's a pretty small one. cheers, Mark

There was a Charlie Hebdo style terrorist attack here in Copenhagen over the weekend. It seems to have been a one-man, amateurish attack - the police fairly rapidly identified a suspect and tried to arrest him when he returned to his apartment. He was killed when he pulled a gun on the police. In the meantime, though he attacked a meeting on press freedom (killing one of the attendees, and wounding two police officers) and then attacked a synagogue, killing a local man who was watching the door while a Bat Mitzvah was in process and wounding two two police who responded. The reason was probably the fact that one of the "Mohammed cartoonists" was speaking at the meeting. One of our friends was also there: on his twitter he describes the shooting and "running away once the shooting started, so fast that he could taste blood in his mouth". There's going to be a lot of followup on this: two people have been detained and charged with "supporting terrorism", but even if it turns out to be one deranged man, people are going to want to know how he got his hands on what witnesses describe as an assault rifle (and certainly the rate of shooting suggests automatic or semi-automatic fire). cheers, Mark

Huh - guess I hit quote instead of edit

Sure. I'm just pointing out that in real life "instant death" (from shooting or stabbing, not from massive trauma) is extremely rare and it almost always actually takes a few minutes. The "unrealistic" part is not that - but the fact that it's so easy to "heal" someone who is not actually really, really dead in Hero system (or in just about any RPG system, for that matter). In real life, even a fully trained and equipped paramedic team can do very little for a person with major internal bleeding - even though that person is walking and talking. I can't, off the top of my head, think of a single game that handles injury in anything like a realistic fashion ... but then, I'm not sure we want one that does. I'm firmly on the cinematic side in this case: I'm not really interested in playing Bedpans and Bandages. cheers, Mark

Although, it should be noted that when the Roman legions first came up against the Phalanx, the legions repeatedly got their butts handed to them. It took them quite a long time to develop tactics to deal with it (the tactics actually being to avoid a direct fight where possible and concentrate on the rest of the army, so the phalanx could be isolated and worn down over time later, or - preferably - not fought at). The Romans also made good use of fortifications and terrain to try and reduce the effectiveness of the phalanx. But it's a myth that the phalanx could not turn easily or fight in rough terrain - the initial victories of Pyrrhus' army were mostly won in rough mountainous terrain - including Asculum, where the phalanx attacked - and defeated - legions dug in on a steep hillside. The Romans had learnt from their earlier disastrous defeats by the phalanx that they could not stand against it in open terrain and the rest of that campaign - a string of victories for the Greeks - was fought mostly in and around the mountains. Likewise, the Macedonian phalanx under Alexander proved capable of taking on all comers - including in rough terrain. The phalanx's biggest weakness is that to function effectively, it needed to be made up of highly-trained soldiers - making it expensive to build and expensive to maintain. It's no coincidence the same sort of troops only reappeared in Europe once professional military or mercenary corp.s became common. cheers, Mark

Actually - again just going off real life and history here - when recruiting mercenaries (or even volunteers who need to be trained) "Do you know how to maintain your weapon?" is not a question that is often asked (simply because the answer just isn't that relevant). It's not that maintaining weapons is unimportant. It's just that a) there are people who do that sort of thing. They don't have to be (usually weren't, in fact) warriors. b ) you're being hired as a warrior, not a weaponsmith c) if you don't know even the basics, somebody can teach you in a spare half hour. Even in an economically pressed situation, it's a pretty safe bet that a warrior who can do that isn't going to get any extra jobs because of it - unless you feel like taking up weaponsmithing as a job. It's not a bad skill to have as a fantasy adventurer (I've had characters myself who have had it) - just not one that is likely to be more than flavour, and certainly not something that I think should be required. Here's a simple acid test: as a GM, how many of you have asked players to make "routine weapon maintenance skill rolls"? If the answer (as expected) is never/almost never then that tells you how frequently PCs should be expected to buy it. cheers, Mark

Dropping an ordinary person to the point where they are bleeding out at 1 BOD per turn means that they will be dead (as in "significantly dead" ) in a couple of minutes. That's about what you get from being shot through the heart. I've seen trauma cases up close and personal and I have even seen a fatal shooting (two 7.56 rounds right through the chest) as it happened. I've been shot (in the head, no less!) myself - and went around with a large steel plate in my skull for years. The gamers' idea that a fatal wound is something that kills instantly - as in, kills in a fraction of second - is an artifact of TV and film where people get shot, fall down and lie still (or from systems where you're fine up until you lose your last hitpoint and then you are dead). That happens, very, very rarely in real life - pretty much the only thing that will kill outright is a large calibre wound with severe brain penetration. (Or you know, gross trauma like having a a couple of tonnes of concrete plate dropped on you from a few metres up - that'll do it too). In reality, even severe head wounds are rarely fatal in a moment - it's just that people in that situation fall down and bleed out quickly, and there's often little or nothing you can do about it. So in real life terms, down and bleeding out in a minute or two is an instant kill. That's what happens in real life when people are shot in the head or a crucial organ. So in that regard, Hero is relatively realistic. The really unrealistic part is how easy it is to "paramedic" someone back to life once they hit that point: in real life, if you are bleeding to the extent that you are going to be past the point of resuscitation inside two minutes, then really, you are beyond saving unless you happen to be already inside a very well-equipped hospital ... and even then, your odds are extremely poor. cheers, Mark

Exactly. We don't require "FAM: Clothes, 8-" so that people can tie their shoelaces, or require Asian characters to buy "PS: Asian Food handling, 8-" so that they can eat with chopsticks. Some things - many things, in fact - are so basic they can (and should) be assumed. Any modern western character can be assumed to know how to use an ATM or a mobile phone, drive a car, purchase food in a supermarket. Any medieval fantasy character can be assumed to know to eat bread carefully, how to negotiate a muddy street or take a casual dump outside without getting filthy, how to haggle over prices, etc. Skills and skill points should be (IMO) reserved for those aspects that define a character - in other words those things that are unusual or unique to him or her, or which are important to what they do. cheers, Mark

There's going to be self-selection bias in any study of this kind. I'd be wary about reading too much into it. But given the size of the corpus, the data are likely reliable, and given what we know about student and university makeup, we can make some assumptions. In Engineering (most STEM subjects, for that matter), for example, we can assume that the overweight of negative descriptions associated with female lecturers in those fields is not due to an overweight of female lecturers. NSF data only goes to 2006, but that was indicating rates in the range of 5-20% for female faculty across various STEM subjects - what I've seen from less comprehensive surveys indicates that not much has changed since. So given that basic assumption there does seem to be a correlation with more hostile characterizations of female faculty in subjects with smaller percentages of female faculty. That's not proof of causation, of course - but it's certainly consistent with it. cheers, Mark

Eh. Even if you are playing in a game that tracks that sort of thing - and I never have - you can always get someone else do do major repairs. Historically, that's what most warriors did. As for minor maintenance, that can be pretty safely assumed to be included in your basic weapon training. Most people who learn to use a weapon have at least a basic idea of how to clean and carry it. cheers, Mark

Also interesting - there is a clear gradient across courses for negative language. Descriptors such as "Bad", "Awful", Horrible", etc all sort with the highest use being in Physics, Economics, Engineering, Mathematics, Chemistry and Computer Science. The precise order varies, but these six are almost always at the top, in terms of frequency (Engineering being the star, appearing most frequently at the top of the list – and I don’t mean that in a good way). Perhaps not coincidentally, these words are more frequently associated with female teachers, both across the board and particularly in these subjects. It could be that teachers in these subjects are just rubbish, but – speaking as a former engineering student – I suspect it reflects a fairly aggressive, highly competitive culture, where putdowns are par for the course (ho ho) and the language directed at females (both students and professors) can be cruel and crude. Certainly it was like that in my time: I hope it’s improved, but these results suggest it has not changed totally. Cheers, Mark